The automotive industry continually strives to provide safe automobiles and so incorporate a number of safety restraint components in a vehicle that reduce the likelihood of injury in the case of a collision. One such safety restraint component is a head restraint. Such head restraints may be active or passive. It is known in the industry to provide a head restraint generally positioned on the back of the seat occupied by a driver or passenger so that in the event of a collision, such as a rear-impact collision, that tends to throw the head in the rearward direction, the head restraint will support the occupant″s head and limit head motion so as to reduce the likelihood of serious injury.
Motor vehicle components must comply with minimum safety requirements mandated by the federal government or comply with OEM specifications that go beyond the federally mandated requirements. Commonly, the specifications are pursuant to required testing procedures. One such testing procedure is directed toward vehicle seat assemblies, including head restraints. Such vehicle seat assemblies are typically tested in a traditional sled test. In the traditional sled test, the entire seat assembly is securely mounted to the sled and a manikin, having at least a torso and head and neck assembly, is positioned in the seat cushion. The sled is then moved along a rail system in a controllable manner. The sled is typically capable of accelerating and/or decelerating motion that causes the manikin assembly to contact and/or penetrate portions of the seat assembly. The dynamic response of the manikin and manikin/seat assembly interactions are monitored and the data used to determine the performance and effectiveness of the overall seat assembly. A vehicle head restraint is typically evaluated during the testing of the overall seat assembly.
During the developmental stages of vehicle component design, several different designs may be proposed. For instance, it is not uncommon that several different head restraint design concepts may be proposed during the development of a vehicle seat assembly. The proposed head restraint design concepts must then be evaluated or tested to determine the viability of each design and eventually which head restraint design concept will be used for vehicle seat assembly production. As it currently stands, in order to test each proposed head restraint design concept, a seat assembly incorporating the proposed head restraint is tested using the traditional sled test as previously described. Evaluating several proposed head restraint design concepts using a sled test on the overall seat assembly is a costly and time consuming methodology.
There is thus a need for an apparatus and method that can be used during the developmental stages of vehicle component design to evaluate several proposed head restraint design concepts in a more cost effective and time efficient manner.